Daryl Hall doesn’t know how he got involved in the yacht rock conversation, but he wants out. In a recent interview on Broken Record, the podcast produced by Rick Rubin and hosted by Justin Richmond, the musician slammed the genre’s entire premise and distanced himself from any association with it.
“This is something I don’t understand,” Hall said. First of all, yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I don’t even understand it. I never understood it… It’s just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there. It’s mellow R&B, smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is.”
Hall believes he’s been linked to yacht rock because of some broader entity’s need to fit him in a box. “People misjudged us because they couldn’t label us,” he said. “They always came up with all this kind of crap, soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense. And none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do, really.”
It might not describe what Hall does on his own, but prior to his falling out with John Oates, Hall & Oats was fairly aligned with the idea of yacht rock. “I think Yacht Rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection,” Oates told Seattle Weekly in 2007 about the online mockumentary series Yacht Rock that was released in 2005. “They were the first ones to start to parody us and put us out there again, and a lot of things have happened because of Yacht Rock.“
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Last year, director Garret Price shared Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, which explored the pseudo-genre through a more serious lens. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the director acknowledged the unfavorable attitude some artists associated with yacht rock, like Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, have toward it — but he still sees the richer value in it.
“But you fall in love with it, and I think it’s because of the quality of the music,” Price said. “It’s complex and trying things, and the lyrics and artistry are so good that it sticks around. We’ve heard it our whole lives. Whether you’re grocery shopping, at a doctor’s office, at CVS, in your parents’ car — it’s always been there. And I think we’ve taken it for granted, a little bit, which also makes it easy to make fun of. A lot of people abandoned this music, but they’ve come back to realize, ‘I like this and it’s OK to like this music.’”
